Some place between the two views of Apple lies the truth, but as a heavy user of technology and one who sees problems that could use the magic Apple touch, I remain unconvinced that the changes at Apple are anything more than cosmetic or that we will see products that might help us have an easier time doing our jobs in a digital world that Apple helped create and even complicate.

Still I am glad to see Apple finally embracing a blog even if it is just for developers who have had a special relationship with Apple for many years. In fact developers have often had a better relationship with Apple than many Apple employees who oft times are in the dark about what the Cupertino mothership has planned. Maybe having a blog will help Apple better understand the needs of web content creators.

Perhaps as a heavy technology user who creates content I am in a small minority, but I remember well the days when Apple brought us WYSIWYG technology that worked very well in the black and white print world of the mid-eighties. Apple kept pace for many years delivering color printing capabilities that set the standard for the rest of the industry.

As content also found a home on the web, Apple got lost. It never came up with a web tool that was worth using. In fact Apple ignored the whole blogging world and missed one of the essences of the web, that your content has to be editable on all sorts of devices even one that you might not manufacture. I always thought Apple was clueless about blogging because no one at Apple ever did any blogging. Certainly iWeb was never a serious competitor.

I started my first blog using TypePad not long after leaving Apple in 2004. That was ten years ago and Apple has finally decided to do a blog but only to try to win developers over to yet another new language. I would be much more impressed if some Apple executives were blogging and trying to learn what Apple needs to do next.

While other companies have been figuring out the web and using it to better understand their customers, Apple has been busy becoming a consumer company with just as much secrecy as the old Apple. Those of us who still use products like RapidWeaver for the Mac to create content are obviously in the minority but I do not think Apple should give up on people like me. While Apple let the whole web world slide by and has been inconsistent with its tools, there is still a vast opportunity out there for an innovative company.

Unfortunately Apple's recent products have not helped. While I like the new Pages 5 tool, you cannot even export HTML from it. With the Beats acquisition, I see Apple moving farther from its roots as company that provides great productivity to users who have to work with digital assets.

We are in a strange world right now where often content is on the web, in ebooks, and in print. It is a very complex process to take content and have it work in a variety of environments. There are tools out there that promise to do this, but they are either expensive or complex to use.

The real genius of Apple that kept the company alive was reducing the complex to simple. When the Mac was introduced, we could print what we saw on the screen. Screen resolution and printer resolution did not increase in lock step but it was close enough and the tools were good enough that we could do a pretty good job producing print jobs and eventually that included color ones.

I just finished publishing the third version of my book, A Week at The Beach - The Emerald Ise Travel Guide. I ended up doing the final Kindle version on Word for Windows and the final print version on Word for the Macintosh. It would have been nice to pull everything together with an Apple product, but Apple obviously wants you to use iAuthor and publish only on their store. Word on the Mac does not do well what the Kindle world requires which is filtered HTML.

While I can understand Apple wanting to tie content to its devices, it would seem logical to me if Apple's devices are the best products for writing Kindle books that Apple will sell more products and probably get more books for the Apple platform. Yet the most recent version of iBooks Author will only export as an iBook, PDF, or Text.

I am not going to pretend this is an easy area to tackle but neither were products like iMovie and iPhoto. There is a huge opportunity for Apple to create an amazing writing tool that gives content creators more flexibility than iBooks Author and also lets them create books for Apple's store, the Kindle store, and for the print world. Apple already has a leg up on being able to use video in iBooks Author but the company also has a serious tilt towards a closed eco-system instead of an open one.

There are also sort of directions Apple could take, but I would love to see something like John Gruber's Markdown language used so that the same content could have different formatting applied to it. I already use a cloud-based product called Draft. Draft has introduced Kindle support so I am anxious to try it.

Right now those of us trying to publish in multiple environments would probably jump on an Apple solution. One that would let me publish to a blog, a web page, a PDF(x3 of course), or a real paper book would be most welcome. Third parties can build those things, but those of use who used the old Apple LaserWriters remember how well things worked when Apple worked closely with Adobe to make sure software, hardware, and printers all worked together seamlessly. I would love to no longer worry about hidden HTML in a Word document.

Amazon with its Kindle reader product for virtually every platform has done a great job making sure a work published on the Kindle store is widely available even on Apple hardware. They also have CreateSpace as an in house paper print publishing firm. They have their delivery mechanism down pat. However, other than emulators to check your work, they provide little help in the actual creation.

If Tim Cook's Apple is truly a more cooperative Apple, it would be great to see Apple become the publishing platform of choice once again even it means having to talk nicely to Amazon.

When I am not trying to coerce last generation tools to produce next generation books and content, you can often find me here on North Carolina's Crystal Coast enjoying one of the most beautiful places on earth.

January 30, 2014

I was hired to go to work at Apple in October of 1984, only a few months after the Macintosh was introduced. My first official day was November 26, 1984. In one of the few moves in those days targeted at saving money, my partner and I did not get to start until after the sales conference that year. We were sure they just did not want to spend the money for another two tickets to Hawaii from Halifax, Nova Scotia.

My days at Apple lasted until July of 2004. This summer it will be ten years since I left Apple and a lot has changed at the company and in my life. In 1984, fresh out of two years in sales management at an Apple reseller, Macs were the only computers in my life.

Today I am down to two Macs and my life has more Windows and Android devices than Apple products. At the peak of our addiction, and I include my family since they were all Mac users, we had well over a dozen Macintoshes not counting my collection of old Macs. Today the total number of Macs across the five adults in the family numbers three. The two that I have and one iMac that my older daughter has. No one in the family has an iPad or an iPhone. Even my wife who loved her 12” Powerbook well beyond its useful life is now using a HP laptop. I think we might be able to find two or three old iPods in drawers.

With the drop in Apple products in our family, I started wondering if the technology in our lives might have been different if Apple had been even more successful particularly outside the consumer world.

Sometimes it is hard to imagine that arguably the world’s most successful technology company might have been more successful, but I expect if you could find other ex-Apple sales folks besides me willing to talk, you might find a number who would agree with me that Apple could have gone farther in the enterprise if they had wanted to do so.

Back in December on my Applepeels blog, I posted an entry, The Decision That Lost The Desktop For Apple. In it I make the argument that the pricing decisions that Apple made at the height of the popularity for the Macintosh II had a huge impact on Apple’s desktop market share.

You could take my reasoning a little further and say that we were all hurt by Apple’s punting on the enterprise market. Certainly the federal information technology world which needs all the help it can get. I have argued at ReadWrite that federal IT is a mess.

Then there is the rest of the enterprise and publishing market which actually kept Apple afloat until Steve Jobs discovered the iPod, iPhone, and iPad. My career at Apple ended roughly about the time that Apple figured out that selling to consumers was a whole lot easier than meeting the demands of fussy CIOs. As an Apple product manager famously once told me, “Customers do not tell us what to make, we tell them what to buy.”

But what if Apple had been successful in the enterprise market? Many of us believed that Apple had all the elements needed to be successful there except the support of Steve. We had a great operating system that was far more secure from viruses at a time when Windows was being swallowed alive by all sorts of threats. In those early days of OS X even Apple laptops and professional desktops were very competitively priced.

We were able to get token support from Steve on some federal requirements like SmartCard support, but there was never a serious push into the enterprise after Steve came back to Apple. There was only ever a handful of enterprise sales people at Apple and in spite of some recent rumblings reported by Business Insider I don't think that is going to really change. My guess is that the 100 enterprise people Apple is looking for probably just cover the ones that got too expensive on the payroll and were let go.

When my team took over the federal market for Apple, we started with one sales person on each coast, one system engineer, my area associate, and me. We joked that we could hold team meetings in my Previa van.

Still Apple and my federal team in particular was very successful in the federal market. Many CIOs were tired of being held over a barrel by Microsoft. The cost for Microsoft Client Access Licenses (CALs) was a thorn in the side of many federal CIOs. However, no CIO federal or otherwise was stupid enough to bet their whole enterprise on Apple which refused to say in public that the enterprise was important to the success of company.

One of my last meetings at Apple was taking Avie Tevanian in June 2004 to see Karen Evans, who at the time was the CIO for the whole federal government. Avie got wound up trying to convince Karen to start developing applications with WebObjects. Karen handed him his head and told him the federal government had moved to COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf) software. She also asked him a question that sent him into a serious enough tailspin that I had to rescue him. She wanted to know why she should trust her important business to company that only ever talked about the consumer market and iPods?

The fact that Apple practically gave up on the federal market and has never taken a lot of the business world seriously left room for Microsoft to keep pounding away on their OS until they came up with Windows 7. The lack of a viable alternative to Microsoft meant they were to maintain their stranglehold on the feds. It also left a lot of the small business world firmly in the grip of Windows XP and its descendants.

My two older children are in IT and the youngest worked in a finance office. My wife worked in an insurance office and after Apple I sampled a number of different workplaces whose only common denominator like those of the rest of the family was that usually I was the only Mac user in groups as large as seventy to one hundred. I struggled through the pains of VISTA but was pleasantly surprised with Windows 7. I held off in getting a smartphone for a long time. A year after my son bought a Droid, I relented and followed his platform choice. I did not even consider an iPhone because the AT&T network was so bad here on the edges of civilization.

At WideOpen Networks job, I am happy to be back at a Mac centric company, but I am not going to give up my Windows gear. I like living in a multi-platform world and I know how fickle the winds of Apple are.

Had Apple been more successful in the enterprise market, my family might never have wandered away from the platform. Obviously Apple is very successful, but just imagine a world where you went to work and everyone was using Macs. I think Apple not pursuing the enterprise world left room for Microsoft to keep plugging away. There was a time when the argument that the Mac was a more secure platform was undeniable.

I stuck with Macs not because of any great love for Apple but because I like using the product. It is not inexpensive to use a Mac in spite of what some loyalists will tell you, but I find myself more productive doing certain things on a Mac so I have not given up on the platform.

Perhaps we have Apple to thank for the fact that we all can buy some pretty nice Windows hardware like my Lenovo Yoga at very reasonable prices and some great tablets like the inexpensive Nexus 7 that I have. If Apple had taken the enterprise market seriously and made some aggressive moves on pricing, this world might be even more Apple centric than it already is. Then again, all that success in the enterprise world might have distracted Apple and we would have never gotten the iPhone and iPad. Then it might have taken a long time for Android to develop and we would have all been stuck with Blackberries.

November 21, 2013

Macs have a long tradition of "just working." Windows stuff is often considered unreliable and unworkable by dedicated Mac users. Some of that is a myth and the reality is probably a little more complex.

In the world of businesses, WideOpen is a rarity, we are a Mac shop. While we have other platforms available, we do all of our proposals in Pages 09 and most of our work is done using Macs. I cheat a little since I handle most of my email correspondence from Thunderbird running in Xubuntu Linux which runs on VMware's Fusion 6 on my MacMini with 16GB of RAM.

One task that I tackled for WideOpen brought home the complexity of today's computing environment. We wanted to export some contacts from Highrise, which is a great cloud-based CRM solution that we use to stay in sync from multiple locations. Someone else had tried to get what we wanted out of Highrise and decided that there was no easy way to do it. That is when the old Mac guy, that would be me, got called in to look at the situation.

Moving contacts from one place to another has never been a favorite task of mine. The way Google handles contacts while not perfect has continued to keep me a fan of their platform. Apple's address book on the other hand has always been a little challenging when trying to get things in or out of it.

Our goal at WideOpen was to have the ability to print address labels for a limited set of contacts that we tagged in Highrise. It seems like a simple enough task but as might be expected getting the results we wanted gave us a few surprises.

I first hoped get a clean .csv file that would let me import the file into my Dymo LaserWriter 400 Turbo software's address book and print from my Windows 8.1 machine. I moved my label printer to my Windows desktop when my iMac died an untimedly death. I had so many early challenges with my MacMini that I never moved it back. Somehow I had managed to carry the old address book from my Mac over. I cannot remember how I did it and it now appears to not be very easy.

First off exporting as a .csv file from Highrise was not much fun since the platform has so many fields which are not needed in address label printing. If there is a way to choose what fields are exported, I have been unable to discover it.

After looking at the .csv file in Excel and trying a few things, I stumbled on the Highrise suggestion that I export my tagged contacts as a multiple-person vCard. I tried it and much to my surprise the contacts came over to my Mac address book. It showed as a Last Import and so I saved it as Smart Group with the name of First Mailing. I then printed it to my regular Brother HL-2270DW using a standard Avery Label format. It worked perfectly.

However, when I sent the instructions to my boss who has his Dymo Turbo LaserWriter label printer hooked to his Mac, the printer was not happy and screwed up the printing. It was late in the day so we gave up.

At dinner that evening, I wondered if my label printer was hooked to one of the very accessible front USB ports on my Lenovo tower or the hard to reach ports on the back. It did not take me long to wander up to my office that evening and discover the label printer was hooked to a front port. I unceremoniously unhooked it and plugged it into the USB port of the Mac keyboard on my Mac Mini. I added the new USB label printer, changed the page setting to Dymo and Address labels, and my test set of labels printed in under a minute.

The whole operation of switching the printer from my Windows computer to my Mac had taken less than five minutes. I was pretty excited and sent a screen shot of the settings to my boss.

When we talked the next morning, I found he had been unsuccessful in using my settings. Even after fooling with it for 45 minutes, he had not been able to get it to work. We have both been serious Mac users since 1984 so there probably little that I could have done in his situation to change the results. Our offices are six hours apart so he finally figured out that the Dymo software can be used with the Mac address book. However, there is a problem with tags in the Dymo software that makes it an imperfect solution. It will be an issue that will take more time than it deserves.

There was a time when Apple made everything from printers and scanners to cameras and almost all the software. There was also a time when the choices in the world of technology were limited. I started with an Apple II+, an Epson MX80, and AppleWriter II. There were not many other choices in those days. Making a few things work well is relatively easy. Making a lot of things work well is much harder. It has always been one of the reasons that the Windows world is more complex.

As Apple has moved to a company that does not make everything, things have become more complex like the Windows world. Back in October 2006, I bought an HP AIO printer and eventually got it working on my Mac and even my Linux computer using Ethernet.

Until this past summer, the HP AIO printer has worked fine on whatever Mac I used. However, when I upgraded to Mountain Lion, the printer would show up but the computer could never connect to it. The printer is on an Ethernet network and four Windows computers have no problem printing to it and they represent Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 8.1. When I upgraded to Mavericks the HP printer worked fine for two days on the network and then stopped again. I tried removing it and adding it back with no change in the problem. Finally I hooked it up using the USB port and everything is fine and the Windows computers still work via Ethernet.

There are mysteries in the computer world and sometimes they are just not worth solving. When I upgraded all three of my computer operating systems recently, the built-in SD card reader stopped working on my Lenovo Windows tower when I took it to Windows 8.1. I chose the easy way out, I just plugged in an external USB reader. That task, just like hooking up the HP printer by USB took seconds and figuring out either problem could take days.

October 11, 2013

I certainly do not claim to be an expert on today's Apple. However, I have lots of history with the company and I have written the only book which describes what it was like to work at Apple in sales.

With that background I can look into the Cupertino tea cup and swirl the tea leaves as well as anyone.

Recent numbers on CNNMoney based on Gartner and IDC suggest that Apple might have had a period of "negative growth" in Mac sales during the critical back to school season. Both Mark Rogowsky, a contributor at Forbes, and John Gruber of Daring Fireball have recently chimed in with perspectives on Apple.

Others have chosen to spin this drop in sales as dramatic. I doubt Apple is any danger. They could keep Tim Cook in sushi almost indefinitely with their offshore billions.

The one take away that I have from Gruber's article is that today people who have the money are willing to pay for Macs.

The Mac today has roughly 10 percent of the PC market, but it’s not just any randomly distributed 10 percent of the market. Quite the opposite — Apple’s 10 percent of the market is entirely comprised of the high end of the market. Mac users are discriminating, willing to pay more for a product they deem superior.

I am not sure many price conscious buyers like me would be surprised that Mac buyers seem to have more money.

Long ago I hinted that Macs would have a hard time getting above 10 percent of the market, and price was a limiting factor then. I think things are perhaps even more challenging today.

My experience which is perhaps different than yours is that Macs have not delivered the value that I want in a computing platform. My computing closet still contains a very expensive 26" i5 iMac that died well before it was two years old. Hopefully it will be this year's holiday project for my son and I to install a new SSD in it.

With Apple's continued focus on thin and light, I have not seen the type of changes that once defined Apple's computer products and kept users on their seats and might have brought me back to its laptop platform. My Windows 8 laptop has a touch screen and it is almost a year old. Apple still does not have touch screens in their laptops and you cannot get an Apple laptop with a SD card reader for under $1,000.

"What it hasn’t done so far is seized on the weaknesses of HP, Dell and others, though, to build a world-class corporate sales organization to push its tablets and PCs aggressively into thousands of organizations worldwide."

As much as I have a problem with Gruber's "discriminating" buyer argument, I came close to choking upon reading the suggestion that Apple build "a world class sales organization."

Actually I think Apple had close to a world class sales organization in the early nineties. It was perhaps one of the things that kept Apple in business long enough for Steve to rescue the company from itself.

Certainly Steve did not love the sales organization and that is one of things that the field sales force clearly understood. Apple's sales leaders after Steve came back were undistinguished and often off base unless you somehow believe that going after the enterprise with iMac based kiosks was a good idea.

As for thoughts that should temper any suggestions that Apple go after the world's corporations with an enterprise sales force, this post, Lingering Regrets From Days At Apple, that I wrote seven years ago is still pertinent.

Apple will never be a successful enterprise sales company, it is not in the company's genes.The company had plenty of opportunities that Microsoft threw in their laps but they punted on them all.

Certainly after Apple's last flirtation with the enterprise which included the Xserve, I would think most large customers would have a hard time seriously considering Apple on the desktop.

If I were an enterprise CIO who had tried Xserves only to see Apple abandon them, I might be worried that Apple would completely give up desktops and laptops for iPhones, iPads, and iPods. The CIO of the federal government was worried about that when I took Avie Tevanian in to meet her back in 2004.

The only real opportunity for Apple in the enterprise is to keep doing what they are doing and penetrate the enterprise with iPads and iPhones which users will demand be supported.

More important in reading Apple's tea leaves than either Gruber's or Rogowsky's article is the hint that the back to school season was not good for Apple. I do not have any inside verification that back to school was not great for Apple. However, it would not surprise me.

Higher education has been a strategic but sometimes under appreciated market for Apple since I joined the company in 1984. One of the things that higher education has always done for Apple is put a device in the hands of the one person most likely to understand leading edge technology in a family, the college student. College students often go home and sell their families on Apple technology. When they graduate from college, they take their Apple devices to work and lobby for corporate support for Apple. It was a well appreciated sales cycle at Apple during my time as a higher education manager. Apple lost a lot of its higher education focus when it rolled the higher education division in with the K-12 folks back in the nineties.

The only time in my memory that we had a bad back to school at Apple during my career there was during Gil Amelio's brief tenure as Apple CEO. He decided that Apple was giving higher education students too good a deal on computers so he raised prices for students. Higher education sales tanked.

Now Apple's prices have not gone up, but their laptop prices have not gone down either. As I suggested in the article that I wrote over four years ago, all you have to do is walk the aisles of either a Best Buy or Staples to get a feeling for just how far PC laptop prices have gone down.

In spite of what Apple folks think, there are some very nice PC laptops out there. I use a first generation Lenovo Yoga which cost me under $1,000. It is my second Lenovo laptop and will not be my last. When I decide to pass this one on to someone else in the family, I will be buying the next generation Yoga. My Yoga has been one of the finest laptops that I have ever used.

Apple has come to believe it cannot make anything worthy of the Apple
brand at a low price point. Lenovo believes it can deliver quality and
still serve customers looking for a good deal.

If they are both right, that's a big win for Lenovo.

If you look at the CNNMoney charts, Lenovo has grown the most of any vendor. While one quarter is too early to make much more than an educated guess, it is possible that the Apple price differential on laptops has finally gotten too much for even college bound parents to bear. Tuition keeps going up and family incomes have not gone up.

We are in a tough economy and the reality is that Apple is a luxury brand. There is protection in being a luxury brand as Gruber hints, but there are limits to your growth if some of your strategic customers have decided your products are too expensive.

Perhaps Apple's actual numbers will spin all of this a little differently. Certainly there is no cause for doom and gloom in the Apple world. After all, someday they might actually ship that new Mac Pro that they announced in June and of course we are due for an iPad refresh. Let me guess, they will be thinner and lighter but will still be lots more expensive than a Nexus or Kindle. Did I tell you I suspected the "new" iPhone might sport some color?

Best Buy's Sunday, October 13, 2013, flyer lists a Lenovo laptop with an I7 processor, a 15" touch screen which is bigger than the 13" MacBook Pro for $829.99. The hard drive is smaller on the Lenovo but the bigger screen would make that a wash for me. As someone told me when I bought my MacMini, you can find USB optical drives for under $70 if you really need one.

I have used a lot of Mac laptops and I judge the quality to be similar to Lenovo. You can make your own judgment, but as of October 13, 2013, you pay a 81% premium for buying a MacBook over a Lenovo. Unless you put a lot of value on Thunderbolt, aluminum, and Firewire 800 as opposed to USB 3.0, I think the Lenovo is a better buy especially for college students.

Laptops are almost a necessity for college students and those of us who travel for work. The word that comes to mind for someone willing to pay 81% more for a product that will likely need to be updated in three or four years no matter which one you buy certainly is not "discriminating."

July 31, 2013

I am sure there are diehard Apple fans who believe nothing is wrong at Apple and the company is hitting on all cyclinders. I doubt that is the case. Unfortunately like all large companies in a very competitive global market, Apple is finding the road to continuing success a road with some twists and turns.

In spite of the challenges, I am not going to join with Doug Ehrman, a contributor to Motley Fool, and suggest that Apple would be better off by getting rid of Tim Cook. I actually thought Ehrman's arguments were particularly weak. The idea that consumers will give Apple a break if they are searching for a new CEO is a fantasy.

One of the biggest challenges for Apple in the nearly twenty years that I was there was the revolving door management. The reality is that you will never replace Steve Jobs. Tim Cook plus almost anyone is still no Steve Jobs, but I firmly believe that Tim needs to find some new leaders with a passion for technology. He needs to stop listening to whomever is whispering in his ear currently and find some folks who can bring some excitement back to the company. There has to be more to innovation than thin, light, high resolution screens, and prices that are higher than anyone else in the industry.

Apple's strategy of taking industry standard parts and demanding unbelievable margins in computers to add to their cash horde is unsustainable in the long run.

If Apple is going to be a premium product, it needs service where there are no hiccups like my iLemon. Even Tim Cook's Executive Relations team which had initially promised to solve all my iMas's problems gave up on it and gave me the remarkably sage diagnosis that it was broken. Guess what? Computers that cost $1,900 and are less than two years old should not break. I had five other people all with similar iMac problems contact me. That included one Apple employee who was afraid to push the issue.

Apple needs a culture change. If you can find someone who worked at Apple and is willing to talk, you will find that Steve Jobs created a company culture where risk taking was discouraged. You will also find that aside from developers, Apple has isolated itself from customers who might at least provide some serious feedback which is not tainted by the famed reality distortion zone. I am not talking about people talking to their local genius bar.

Apple still does not understand the cloud and their new beta of cloud based software is almost embarrassing. iWork beta in the cloud cannot import RTF files. (note hyper links are now working)

Pre-announcing a new product like the new Mac Pro and not shipping it is even worse than the fiasco that Steve Jobs created in 2003 when he preannounced the G5s in June and was unable to ship any until the end of July.

I use both Windows 8 and Mac OS X Mountain Lion. I find Windows 8 more stable and more usable. I cannot stand the dumbing down of OS X and apps like iPhoto which I have stopped using.

If you are going to have the best products, quit doing stupid things like putting the SD slot on the back of a huge iMac screen. Make sure your products are also the best to service. Having to pull the huge LCD panel to get to a hard drive should not be the first choice.

Apple has always been proud that they ignore the competition and make their own way. That may no longer be possible. They need people who can figure out what the competition is doing right and help Apple get ahead of the curve. I see no evidence that Apple has people like that currently.

What's is still right with Apple

They have some very passionate customers, but even there their patience is limited. We had an Apple user visiting with us recenlty He was very ticked off that his photos which should have been in the iCloud and on his iPad were missing in action. His comment to me was that it was becoming too complex to be an Apple customer. I promise that I did not coach him. As far as I could tell he had everything set correctly and the photos were just not there.

Apple has a core of great products. They need to get better not just thinner, lighter or weirder.

They have a strong developer community.

There are some very hard working and bright Apple employees.

What does Tim Cook need to do?

He has to decide what the new Apple is going to be. It will not be Steve Jobs' Apple.

Innovation has to once again become a core value at Apple.

Apple can no longer afford to screw up the cloud. Go buy Dropbox or someone else who has a good cross-platform cloud model and then add some Apple value to it.

Get OS X back to being the best OS out there. That I prefer Windows 8 and Xubuntu Linux to Mac OS X Mountain Lion should be an embarrassment to Apple.

People still use devices for the software. If you cannot figure out how to create great software, you better start throwing some more support towards open source. While Picasa might not be as pretty as iPhoto, try editing a few dozen photos with each and tell me which one does it easier and better. I already know the answer.

Why am I still rooting for Apple.

I love nicely designed hardware and I still think Apple can be the best source of this.

I want competition. It is the way we get better products.

Twenty years at a company even if the last two were the pits still makes you root for them a little.

For those who have just found my Applepeels blog, it, like me, has been around for a long time. There is more about me at this link or it you want to explore my non-Apple writing a little more try this link but it comes with some upfront apologies if my page does not resize properly in your browser.

At one time I had over a thousand pages of posts on Applepeels. Apple never challenged the accuracy of a single one of my posts. However, much of the older Applepeels content is now found in our book, The Pomme Company.

And for those who might care, the book is now available in paperback. It is expensive because of the large number of color pictures, but on the other hand, the Kindle version is very inexpensive. Print production costs are what they are.

Just to be clear so potential readers understand the book's content, there are no Apple secrets in the book. It is about working at Apple. However, no other person that I am aware of who was at Apple for nearly twenty years has written an unchallenged book. Every Apple employee who was part of the history and who has read the book and communicated back to me has commented that if anything I was too kind to Apple.

Little of what I saw has changed according to reports from people still at Apple. I did work with Tim Cook so my comments are not idle speculation. If you want to see what it is like to be in Apple sales, the book will meet your needs. The book will most definitely show you a side of Apple that few people aside from Apple employees have ever seen.

April 30, 2013

It has been nearly two months since I scanned the headlines on Apple websites. It has been even longer since I wrote my last article on Apple at ReadWrite. I have been busy getting two books out the door.

I am not surprised that there is little to draw me beyond the typical Apple headlines. I got the feeling that Apple and I were heading in different directions as I was finishing up my books. I am one of those people who still work with desktop computers, build websites, manipulate photos and graphics. I suspect in Apple's world that I am something of a dinosaur. I judge platforms by the applications that they bring to me and the productivity that I find from using those tools. I do not own an iPhone or an iPad.

Still I am not here to argue that Apple is going to disappear, is poorly managed, or has crummy products. By most financial measurements Apple of 2013 is a great success. Unfortunately, all that success has not made it to my desktop. I am here to report that I see little reason to keep Apple on my immediate radar. I am actually down to two applications that only run on a Mac. I still cling to Pixelmator as a favorite graphics tool and I have a couple of websites where I use Rapidweaver, but that is it. The rest of my Mac experience is gone. I got tired of waiting for new versions of the iWork suite. iPhoto managled one too many photo libraries and why anyone would put up with iCloud and its services is beyond me. I use Postbox on Windows for my mail.

I did give Apple a fair chance at keeping my loyalty. I bought a new MacMini in January and with the OX 10.8.3 update it has become a stable and reliable partner. It is not nearly as fast as my similarly powered Lenovo desktop running Windows 8 but speed is not really the issue. The real issue is that there is no software that draws me over to the Mac platform and I am not that happy with the Mountain Lion interface which should scare folks since Windows 8 is my main other platform.

I thought iAuthor might be something that would be important to me, but when I found out that it would only work with an iPad attached, I gave up on the Mac as my publishing platform. Amazon has a very capable piece of software that emulates a Kindle which I can use to view my work before I publish. There are some subtantial advantages to being on the Kindle platform so it did not take much to kill the idea of moving my books over to the iPad. While I am not a huge fan of Word, it seems to be the best tool with the most specific instructions for creating books to be published on the Kindle platform. I actually tried my older version of Word running on the Mac but it just made for some additional work.

Then there is the whole cloud issue. DropBox, Google Drive, and SkyDrive all work very well and do what I need. I have still not met anyone who loves iCloud. I know Apple keeps making some incremental changes to Photostreaming to make it palatable, but I have been burned too many times by Apple's ever changing online photo storage strategies. I do not care about iCloud anymore.

This August will mark thirty-one years since I first came to the Apple platform. I got excited about it because I could do things with that first Apple II+ and subsequent Macs that I could not easily do with other computers. That has changed and I did fight the change. Over the years I campaigned for a better and more reliable iPhoto and even a small tower that would more closely meet the needs of those of us who still believe that creating quality content requires more than an iPad or iPhone. I even sort of grew to like Pages before I decided it had become just another abandoned Apple software product.

Even if Apple does come up with a tower, I likely will not be looking at it because I do not see a new version of Microsoft Office coming to the Mac in the near future. I have more hope that I will figure out how to use Google Docs to publish my books than I do that Microsoft is going to bring an upgraded version of Office to the Mac. It is not that I love Google more than Apple but they do update their core products regularly. Beyond the Office issue, Apple has become an expensive platform. If you want to argue with me on that consider first that I have purchased three I5 computers in the last six months, one Lenovo Ultra Book, one Lenovo tower, and one MacMini so I know what comes with each system. I am not really intrigued by ever thinner iMacs. I would rather have a more reliable one instead of the one in my equipment closet that died an early death.

As I watch Apple executing its huge bond deal in order to buy stock back to keep its stockholders happy, I have to wonder what it would have cost to get some upgraded iWork apps out the door and make OS X better not just glitzier. Some professional Mac users would have paid for those new Apple products. That the MacMini on my desktop is more a curiosity than my workhorse is a little sad. After all, over thirty years is a long time to live on a particular platform, but when all the signals to move on are there, it is hard to ignore them.

Years ago Apple gave me the tools to do some really neat things. Today the deep integration of Google's mapping software and its seamless integration with Google's cloud services for maps and photos let me create a rather unique travel guide. The mapping done on my Android phone would not have been as easy on the iPhone. Certainly the mapping tools in Lightroom sealed the deal for me. My decision to run Lighroom on my Lenovo tower came down to pure economics. The $599 MacMini came with a 500 GB hard drive and the $479 Lenovo came with a 1 TB hard drive and had more room for photos. Its storage is also more easily upgradeable than the MacMini's.

I will continue to keep an eye on Apple, but it will be more to fulfill my curiosity than to plan any further purchases. I have no doubts that there are plenty of folks out there sitting on the edge of their chairs just waiting for the next Apple product. I hope whatever it is goes well for Apple and for them.

February 15, 2013

This is the second part of a two
part series about how Windows users contemplating the shift to Windows 8 might
find the world of Apple if they choose to buy a Macintosh instead of upgrade to Windows 8. The first part
was on hardware. This piece covers
software, the “Cloud,” and a few other considerations.

While there are more cross
platform applications out there than there were a few years ago, the ones you
need, might not work the way you expect on a Mac. I am a big fan of SnagIt from Techsmith. It works well on both Macs and Windows. Yet there is one issue. While Snagit on Windows works with my
favorite cross-platform mail application, PostBox, it will
only work with Apple’s
Mail app on Mac OS X. I am not a fan of
Apple's Mail program. This kind of thing is one of those gotchas that can make moving to a new
platform irritating so you need to check apps that are important to you.

If you come over to Apple and end up using Apple’s iPhoto to manage your photos, you
might find some options gone for political reasons. Sharing is built in iPhoto for Facebook,
Flickr, and Twitter but not for Picasa web albums. Apple does not like Google
so you have to buy a third party plug-in or use a browser to get you photos
uploaded. iPhoto also creates a
proprietary library of your photos instead of just pointers to JPEGs. You could just switch to Picasa on the Mac,
but then there is no way to get your photos into Apple's iCloud without doing some scripting or
owning an iOS device.

One of the things you need
to accept when moving to Apple is that Apple wants you to do things a certain
way and deviating from the chosen path usually causes some sort of pain. That
is even the case in software.

If Microsoft Office is
your standard office suite, you likely know there is a new version out for
Windows Computers. I just subscribed to Office 365 for
$99 per year. The last version for the
Macintosh was released in 2011. While the files are supposed to move back and
forth without problems, my experience is that there are always a few little things
that do not work or there is an extra space here or there.

However, there is some
good news on the Office front for the Mac.
The latest update from Microsoft resulted in a dramatic speed increase
in loading the Office apps on my new Mac Mini.
That is good since no one is really sure when there will be a new Office for the Mac. The rumor that Microsoft might bring Office to Linux seems more promising than the
statement that no new Office is planned for the Mac.

The one other thing that I have noticed is that after using Office 365 a lot and moving back to Office on the Mac, I am having trouble finding things. I am a casual Office user so it might just reflect that, but it is enough of a problem that I now use Teamviewer to control my PC from the Mac so I can use Office 365 instead of Office 2011 on the Mac.

Beyond Office, even some
Mac users are questioning how much attention Apple is paying to their own
software. Pages, Numbers, and Keynote (Apple's iWork suite of productivity apps) have not seen a major update in their desktop versions since 2009. Jason Grady writing for ZDNet
had the following comment.

“Instead Apple proceeds with
its release and abandon strategy. Release
iWork into the market with great fanfare and starve it until it eventually
dies. What makes matters worse is that Apple will not comment on its iWork
roadmap. Not even a 'we're working on it.' Nothing.”

Apple has even dropped
iDVD which makes sense inside the Apple world since Apple is moving away from
DVDs. However, many of us still use DVDs.
Tidbits which has been publishing information about
the Mac on the web and using Macs in their workflow for 22 years recently said of Apple,
“Apple
software —
from iOS 6 to Pages 4.3 — has been falling down. Great
hardware, increasingly sloppy software.”

If the “Cloud"
is important to you, you should be aware that Apple has struggled with its
vision for the Cloud. Apple has changed its Cloud strategy multiple times with
the result that many no longer trust Apple's with their data. Also Apple’s current iCloud implementation is
very different than other vendors' Clouds. It takes some getting used to and it
is hard to escape since it is built into the OS.

I still find there are some very good apps on the Mac. I use RapidWeaver for web development and Pixelmator for graphics. Sometimes I will write with Nisus Writer Express. It depends on my mood. As for utilities, Fetch is still my favorite FTP client.

Apple’s apps
and a few other applications like PIxelmator have the ability to save to iCloud if the software vendor has chosen to market their software through Apple's app store. However, even those other non-Apple apps which can save to Apple's iCloud save to
someplace invisible in Apple's iCloud.
You can find a hidden folder on your Mac which shows you what is there
but it takes some digging. You cannot see those files when you log into iCloud
with a browser like you can the iWork files. It is a weird concept.
Of course the apps know that the files are there but if you want to open the file with another app, you are out of luck. Apple just figures that there are
things you don't need to know or do. It is one of the things you need to accept if you plan to go to a Mac.

Beyond software, you need to consider setup. In spite of the Mac's reputation for ease of use. Setup on a new Mac can sometimes be not so easy as I found out. I have brought up a lot of Macs over the years and my most recent one was not any fun.

There is no doubt that Apple has an App store with far more software than Microsoft, but there is a downside to the app store. Apple's OS strategy
also revolves around that same App Store and my experience is
that it is a work in progress. In setting
up two new Windows 8 machines and my new Mac Mini, I found the Windows 8
machines required much less of my attention.
If you opt for a Mac and have even a decent Internet connection prepare
for some long downloads. I have TimeWarner cable and a 4.8 GB OS backup
download took eight hours. Most updates
you can have automatically applied but I still have to manually apply all the
ones from Microsoft for Office on the Mac.

You will find support and repair are not as accessible to Mac owners.

Using a Macintosh is great until something goes wrong and you will quickly find
that people who really know Macs are harder to find than knowledgeable Windows
people. If you live outside a major
metro area, be prepared to drive to the nearest Apple store for repair or face
to face support. There are far fewer Apple repair centers around than Windows
ones. It used to be the answer to most
Mac problems was reinstall the operating system. That is not as easy to do now
that install DVDs are gone. You can make one of your USB thumb drives a backup OS X installer, but my experience has shown that can have
some challenges. I had to buy third party software to create one for my Mac Mini.

Little things like navigating your computer will be different on the Mac.

When you are using a computer, the file system becomes very important. Do not
let someone convince you the Mac OS X Mountain Lion is more like Windows 7 than
Windows 8. I have used Macs for 28 years
and I find the latest version of OS X Mountain Lion the most confusing yet. It is
powerful and has a lot to like, but there is also a lot to learn. It has taken me just as long to get up to speed on it as it did for me to figure out Windows 8.

Apple decided with their
previous Lion release that the command "Save As" is not a good thing.
Some apps no longer have that command but now in Mountain Lion you can get it
back if you hold down the “option” key when you go to the file
menu. Still the new “Duplicate” and “Move”
commands can be confusing. Macs also do
not remember the last place you saved something like Windows. You can buy third party
software like Default Folder
X to fix that, but it is still not quite as easy to find
something on a Mac. Navigating around a Mac can be confusing especially when
Apple decides to hides important things like the user library.

There are some very neat things
on the Mac like AirDrop and AirPlay
which require other Macs or more Apple hardware like AppleTV before you enjoy them. Windows Media Center works pretty well with
existing Windows 7 machines so that is not too different since both platforms want you to stick with one platform.

The last worry is
security. I've used both platforms for over 8 years. Since MS introduced their
security program, that is the only security program I have used. I have had no
virus or worm problems on either platform, you just have to practice safe computing. At one time this was a huge advantage for the Mac. Now it is not so much.

All this boils down to a
move to the Mac will mean lots of changes especially in the way you view your
computer vendor. If you are coming to
the Mac, you need to believe Apple knows best or you will never be comfortable. Just like you cannot fight city hall, you likely will not be able to fight Apple. Is it any different in the Windows world. I would argue that Apple would not put up with an app like Start8 which brings back the old Windows Start Menu, but maybe I am wrong. They did relent a little on "Save As."

The Mac platform has some
great capabilities, but you will have to work to master them. The way you do things on a Mac is a little different. My conclusion is that
moving to Windows 8 is the best course for most Windows users. The learning
curve on the Mac is substantial for a Windows user. However, I encourage you to weigh what I have presented, talk to Mac users and make your own decision. Everyone's needs are different. What works for me, might not even fit your desk. :-)

However, for many Windows users it might just be easier to
stay the course with Windows and buy a new Windows 8 machine.

The simple addition of the $4.99 Start8 utility can make the Windows 8 experience a
lot like the old Windows. Once you have
done that, you can choose to ignore the parts of Windows 8 that don’t fit
the way you work.

I would not let anyone scare me away from Windows 8. I am not having any
trouble using it. I have it on two machines. One has a touch screen and the other has only a mouse. I am betting Microsoft will listen to customers and make it
better like they did with Vista.

Windows 8 is powerful and
very fast. When I boot both my Mac Mini
and Lenovo tower, even I if start the Mac Mini first, I usually have several
Windows applications launched before the Mac Mini even makes it to the desktop.

On my most recent startup,
I turned my Mac Mini on first. By the time the Mac Mini had gotten to the
desktop and launched Chrome, I had turned on the Windows 8 machine and launched the following programs on Windows
8.

Chrome

Firefox

SnagIt

Postbox (all my mail was
also retrieved)

Picasa

Excel

Word

Lightroom

Trillian

Opera

The Lenovo tower has 8 GBs
of RAM. The Mac Mini has 16 GBs of RAM.
Both systems have standard SATA hard drives and I5 processors.

In a series of two articles, I want to explore how someone coming from the Windows world might see the Apple world as an alternative to upgrading to Windows 8. I use both Windows 8 and Mac OSX Mountain Lion on new hardware. A lot of this is based on my own shopping experience and preferences on computers that I have just purchased.

The choices that you might make would likely be different especially if you are a dedicated Mac user, but many Windows users venturing into the Apple world should be able to relate to this. With that introduction, here is how I see it.

As a Windows 7, Windows Vista, or even Windows XP user, you are likely aware of
the big changes Microsoft has made to the Windows 8 interface. Perhaps you have
even heard someone suggest that Windows 8 has such a huge learning curve that
it would easier to just move to a Macintosh. Apple of course would
love for you to “upgrade your computer experience instead of just upgrading
your computer.”

Before you leave the world of Windows for the kindly embrace of
the reality distortion field of Cupertino, consider your options carefully.
These hardware thoughts will frame the argument but to cover all the
bases will require a second post. There is a lot more to moving to a
Macintosh than just finding the on switch on one of Apple’s elegantly designed
pieces of hardware.

Shopping for Apple hardware is in a sense uncomplicated. They only make a few models and they release them on their schedule not
anyone else’s. If you do not like what Apple has, you either wait or go to
another platform,

In February 2010, my wife’s ancient 12 inch Aluminum Powerbook
needed replacing. I waited a couple of months for Apple to ship the new I5
processor laptops. Finally I gave up and bought her a Windows laptop. I
actually ended up buying her and myself new
laptops. My 15 inch HP I7 laptop and her 14 inch HP I5
laptop together cost $200 less than one Apple I5 inch laptop with an outdated
processor. Three years later my wife is still happily using her system.
My youngest daughter has inherited mine.

Finding the exact combination of hardware and features you want
is a little more challenging in the Apple world than in the wide open world of
Windows hardware. Hardware from Apple is based on what they want to market not
necessarily what you might want to buy. Today that means if you
want a SD slot for photo memory cards, you will not find it in
Apple’s lowest priced laptop.

There is no escaping you will spend more money if you chose to
go to the Macintosh. In spite of Apple recently dropping their prices on
some laptops, Apple laptops
often cost nearly twice the money that a Windows laptop will cost. Before
the Apple fans jump in and complain about the comparisons, let us go ahead and
say that Apple is going to give you fit and finish that you will probably not
be able to match in a Windows laptop. Perhaps Google's Pixel Chromebook might be engineered to compete, but Apple is hard to beat on hardware design. They will throw in some leading edge
technology that may or may not be of value to you. If you want that Apple level
of fit and finish, do not bother reading any further just get out
your check book and go buy a Mac.

However, if you are like many of us and just want a functional
laptop that will last you three or four years, there are plenty of them out
there in the Windows world. The quality varies widely. However, I would rank my current Lenovo I7 Ideapad
with the best of the Mac laptops I have ever used so my pricing example comes from
Lenovo. Remember we are trying to decide if it makes sense for a Windows
user to go to the Mac instead of upgrading to Windows 8.

On Lenovo’s website it is easy to find a 14 inch Lenovo laptop with an I7
processor, 8 GBs of RAM, 1 TB hard drive and a DVD drive on special for $699. There are never significant specials in Apple’s world. On Apple’s website,
the 13 inch MacBook Pro with a slower I5 processor, half the ram, and half the
hard drive space will cost you $1199. The Mac does have slightly
better resolution along with Thunderbolt and Firewire ports. Of
course the Mac has OS X, but we will discuss that in part two of this series.

You should also
keep in mind that many monitors require $30 adapters to work with anything
Apple. My Mac Mini came with one, but I had to buy a second for my second monitor. My closet full of adapters did not have the one that I needed. Apple is the king of special adapters so just be prepared. They are part of the Apple world.

The numbers show the lowest priced Apple 13 inch MacBook Pro
laptop that I found is 72% more expensive than the Lenovo which has a better
processor, more RAM, slightly larger screen, and a bigger hard drive. While specs might not matter and
it is all about user experience and elegant design for Mac lovers, numbers do not lie. Mac laptops cost a lot more.

There are some categories where Apple's prices are even less
competitive. If you want a Mac tower, it will cost you close to $3,000. While my new Lenovo tower does not even come close to matching the power
of the Mac Pro models, it only cost me $499. This week of February 17, the same Lenovo tower is on sale at Staples for $449.99. The closest thing in price
to my Lenovo tower is the Mac Mini.

Again you get less for you money when you buy the Mac. My I5
Lenovo came with 8 GBs of RAM, 1 TB hard drive, keyboard, mouse, and DVD
burner. My Mac Mini came with 4 GBs of RAM, 500 GB hard drive, no
keyboard, no mouse, and no DVD burner and retailed for $599.

If you get the Lenovo at this week's sale price, the Mac Mini is 33% more expensive, not really a tower, has less
RAM, a slower I5 with less cache, a smaller hard drive, no keyboard, mouse or DVD burner. In defense of the
Mac Mini, it is one of the nicest small computers that you can buy. I love mine and use it as the basis for my
whole desktop virtualization experience. However, by the time you upgrade the RAM, add a DVD drive, keyboard, mouse, and external drive for storage, it is not inexpensive. If you feel like you need those items like I did, you can easily add another $170 to $200 to the cost of the Mac Mini even if you stay away from Apple branded accessories.

There was a time when you could argue that Macs came with SCSI
hard drives and perhaps arguably better processors, but today most of these
components are the same. Apple just makes more money on the assembled
pieces than anyone. They have the cash hoard to prove it.

One final argument that you will hear on hardware, is that Macs
last longer than Windows machines. There was a time I would absolutely
have agreed with that argument and that Macs in general last longer. Now I am not so
sure.

If Mac users keep their computers longer than PC users, it might
only reflect the natural reaction to keeping more expensive products a little
longer. In 2013 it may not matter how long you want to keep your Mac since
Apple is aggressively bringing out yearly operating system upgrades which regularly
drop support for older hardware.

If you have a Mac system older than three or four years, it is likely Apple is going to abandon your old hardware anyway. Remember Apple makes money selling hardware. They are pretty well giving
away their operating system.

In the next article I will deal with software and operating system differences
for migrating Windows users.

February 10, 2013

We all have different expectations from the companies that have helped define our lives. My hopes for Apple revolve around the tools that the company created or helped popularize over the years. Many of those innovations let me do things that I could hardly imagine.

With me it started with an Apple II+, AppleWriter II, and an Epson MX-80 dot matrix printer. Then there was the Mac, Pagemaker, and Illutrator, iPhoto, iMovie, and iDVD. While not all of these came from Apple, their initial releases were tied closely to the Macintosh. Since the announcement of the Mac, the Mac desktop has been an important part of my life. Today I still use the Mac, just not as much. Linux has won a significant piece of my desktop.

Even when I gave my desktop over completely to Apple, it was not always been a smooth ride. Products like Claris Emailer and iDVD were dropped. Some things like iPhoto's integration with the Cloud and web pages have changed for the worse. Perhaps iWeb was the best indication that Apple never could quite understand that to be successful on the web you need to divorce the device from the data. Google certainly understands that. I would even argue that Microsoft is better at it than Apple. Then there is an application like Pages which took me a long time to embrace for a few things only to watch Apple decide to ignore it. I might not agree with Microsoft's direction on Excel, but I doubt they will ever ignore it.

Apple's misunderstanding of the cloud imight someday be looked upon as a major mistake. Still there is no question that Apple remains a money machine. What I am wondering is can Apple still innovate in a way that really matters. It is not a new question. I found this August 18, 2011 article by Brandt Dainow, Why the iAd was a failure, an interesting read. I especially like this quotation which refers to an earlier article of his.

The thrust of my criticism was that if Apple creates aspirational and innovative new products, but then restricts access to them, it forces others to create competing systems. By refusing hardware manufacturers such as Samsung and Nokia access to the iOS system, Apple forced them into the arms of Google and Microsoft. I argued that, just as the Mac had gone from 30 percent market share at its peak to less than 3 percent today, so would the iPhone go in the mobile market.

While the Mac has gotten up to 10% or so of market share, there are those who are now arguing that it has peaked.

It turns out that a lot of what Apple has done throughout its history is to create innovations and then to try to wall them off. There was a time before Windows 7 when many computer users would have loved to have the more secure and capable OS X running on their Dell or HP. Apple was sure that letting OS X into the wild would destroy the company. It turned out that Apple's success was not destined to come from OS X anyway. It was going to come from the iPod, iPhone, and iPad and related services which now make up close to 86% of Apple's revenue. I always thought that it was funny that I had to buy a third-party add-on for iPhoto just to do something as simple as put my photos in Google's Picasa web albums without resorting to a browser.

In a sense Apple is now trying to use OS X to drag along those of us still creating content with Macs. It likely will not work. The web is changing everything and Apple's walled worlds are showing some huge cracks. Android may be as unstoppable in the mobile market as Windows was in the desktop market.

Android runs on a lot of hardware from different companies. I like to compare the sharing options that I get when viewing an image on the Mac with what I get when viewing an image in the gallery on my Android phone. There are twenty choices on my LG Spectrum phone instead of the seven choices in Apple's Preview. Of course Apple is not the only guilty party in limiting our choices. When I want to share a photo from my Amazon Cloud Drive using my Kindle Fire, I only get four choices. That lack of choice has a lot to do with my decision to make a Nexus 7 my main tablet. I get more choice on a lot of things.

By trying to control everything, Apple limits our choice and opens the door to innovation from others. But if the limitations that Apple forces on us are severe enough, then the market is guaranteed to respond with other choices. Some of the choices might not be goods ones, but then again some of those choices might be really good ones like the Nexus 7 that I'm using.

While some argue that the only way for a good user experience is to let Apple control everything, my experience has shown that Apple cares little about the user experience except to want to use it to prod me towards their vision of a pure world with only Apple products and services.

It will be interesting to see how well Microsoft's experiment in using their operating system to prod us toward tablets and the Surface Pro will work. Actually the operating systems of both Microsoft and Apple are not very high on my list these days. I am moving towards a roll your environment using virtualization. Look for my upcoming article on it at readwrite.

For now I would like just one sign that Apple cares about my user experience. I will nominate bringing back the "Escape" key in iPhoto as a way to return to the library instead of clicking on the annoying "Photos" button. I doubt we will see that since the march of Mac OS X towards iOS likely will accelerate instead of slow down.

In truth, it does not matter. I have found a new solution, Adobe's Lightroom. Guess what? The "Escape key" works like it should there. A better sign for me to pay attention to is Frank, our great egret from Canada.

January 21, 2013

I took delivery of an I5 Mac Mini on Friday, January 11. The next night I finally called it quits with my problematic iMac, the iLemon. I opened my new Mac Mini’s box and began a strange journey. You can read a summary of my challenges setting up the Mac Mini on readwrite at "Mac Mini Tale of Woe Part Deux."

I actually think the Mac Mini is one of the best designed pieces of Apple hardware that I’ve seen in a while. In one respect that is great. It is good to know that Apple still knows how to design really good computers.

Unfortunately the process of setting up the Mac Mini and the software on the Mac Mini are not as good as the hardware deserves. It makes me question the current direction of Apple. Still I hope that some of the recent management changes will fix these problems. I would like to see Apple get back to the point where we can say, "Buy a Mac because it just works."

The crux of the matter is that Apple who is trying to convince us to throw away our CDs and DVDs has some bugs to work out in their new world of on-line software downloads.

Once I got my Mac Mini fully updated at the Apple App Store and it was not an automatic process, I wanted to download a copy of the Mac OS Lion 10.8.2 that the Apple App Store had just finished installing on my computer. That turned out to be impossible. The App Store insisted that the Mountain Lion it had just finished installing on my computer was not compatible and could not be downloaded.

Since the linked readwrite article was written a few days ago, I have continued to bang away at this technical issue. While I now have a very usable Mac Mini, I still do not have a downloaded copy of the version of Mac OS X 10.8.2 (build number 12C3104) which runs my Mac Mini.

I tried again to get a copy of Mt. Lion with the Mac Mini but I was still unable to download a copy of Mt. Lion. I then tried downloading a copy using my Mountain Lion external drive hooked to my iMac. Unfortunately the version that I got was the same version that was already on the external drive, build number 12C60. It took an amazing ten hours to download on our cable modem. I can usually download a full Linux ISO image in under ten minutes.

I got the suggestion from a knowledgeable friend at Apple to try forcing a restore to the external drive. That actually looked pretty promising for a while since it indicated that it was downloading some additional components. Unfortunately once it was finished it was still the same old build and the external drive still would not boot my Mac Mini.

Since then I have created a “Restore” USB drive and after buying another hard drive and using SuperDuper, I have cloned the hard drive that is the boot drive for the Mac Mini. I could not use SuperDuper just to clone the system to my old external drive since it formats the whole drive first. I also believe that the cloned drive has a “Restore” partition. When I get a chance I’ll have a look at it in terminal. I am beyond tired of fooling with it at this point. You cannot see the “Restore” partition using disktools. I am also using Time Capsule with the new external drive. In theory I should be fine.

Of more worry to me now that I have sort of solved the backup booting issue is that I have seen a few software errors and one iPhoto crash already with Mountain Lion. The most recent problem was a Time Capsule one. I have seen it three or four times while I was writing this article. Just after I set up the new Mac Mini, I also got an inconsistency warning for the new iPhone library that I created. The library only had a couple of days of photos. I made no attempt to bring most of my photos over.

None of these are huge issues individually, but they are things that I hoped to not see on a brand new computer which does not have any software that should cause problems. The disappointment started the moment the “UPDATE ALL” button did NOT work at the App Store. I had to go through the updates one after the other making sure that the iPhoto update was done last.

Updating the Mac Mini required my presence while, the two Windows 8 computers that I have brought up recently all magically did the updates by themselves.

Based on this experience I know there are some warts on the App Store. If you cannot download the software that you just installed on a computer, that is a serious problem. Maybe I’ll never have to deal with it, but my whole career at Apple which spanned nearly twenty years, I carried some sort of recovery disks with me.

I cannot believe this is saving Apple any money, and I would gladly pay $15 for a DVD with my OS on it. I think that is how much I paid for the last set that I got from HP. I actually don’t care if they are the latest and greatest disks as long as they will boot my computer. I would rather have a set of disks with 90% of the latest software than nothing at all. Surely downloading the 10% of new components would be more efficient than the ten hour download that I endured. I’ve been in a lot of hotels where there is no way you could get a long download done.

Anyway I still love my Mac Mini, and I hope Apple will solve this problem sooner rather than later. I don’t mind waiting for 10.8.3 to boot my Firewire External Drive now that I could boot via my USB drive if necessary. For those following the issue of iDVD (the reason I bought the Mac Mini) disappearing. I dug out my iLife 11 disks and installed iDVD on the new USB disk. I got strange warnings about an expired certificate, but I installed it anyway. I booted up with the USB drive and iDVD works fine which means I expect it will work fine when I can boot from my Firewire 800 drive which has my iDVD projects. How long iDVD will work is another question, but I should get at least another year out of it once my Firewire Drive gets updated. When I find an update that breaks iDVD, I just won't apply it to the Firewire drive. I will start evaluating replacements for iDVD as soon as I get a chance.

My Mac Mini is now front and center on my desk. You might have a hard time finding it, but it is driving the center screen (Xubuntu) and the Apple cinema display (OSX) to the right of it. The Mac Mini now sports 16 GBs of ram, 2 TB of external storage, and a Samsung DVD burner.

Given the challenges that I’ve had with Mountain Lion, I’m now doing most of my work on Xubuntu running on VMware’s Fusion product. As you can see from my desk, I have all the hardware that I need with an I5 Windows 8 tower to the left of me and an I7 Windows 7 Lenovo laptop to the right of me. My trusty old G5 is also hooked to the monitor of the Windows 8 tower so I can easily access it if need be. There also is another Linux box hiding on one of the tables under my Epson all in one ink jet printer. I can drive the old Pentium III Linux box from the center monitor if I need to, but I hope to donate it soon to an aspiring young programmer.

The Mac Mini didn’t end up being particularly cheap since I had to buy another external drive that I didn’t really need, but hopefully the investment which includes a Samsung DVD drive will be well worth it over time. I added a new LG LCD monitor but it took me a while to figure out that you can use a mini display port to DVI connector in the Thunderbolt port. Just that adapter from Apple was another $30 dollars.

I will leave everyone with one question. We now have four Windows computers in the house and one Mac Mini running Moutain Lion. My wife’s Windows 7 laptop and my Windows 8 Lenovo Yoga machine both have just 4 GBs of RAM and are I5 powered. I haven’t even considering upgrading the ram in either one of them because they are both very responsive. I am sometimes amazed by how much stuff I have open on the Yoga.

When I got the Mac Mini, it also just had 4 GBs of ram. I found it almost unusable. I am curious if anyone else has noticed that Mountain Lion seems to take a lot of ram compared to either Windows 7 or 8? I noticed the same thing on my iMac since it had 8 GBs of RAM which is the same that I have in my other Lenovo laptop. I blammed that on the flaky iMac. However, the Mac Mini has no excuse and wasn't much fun until it got some serious RAM.